December

by Phil Rickman

  Amid all the china plates on the walls, there was a gilt-framed board with about twenty photos under glass. A young man in a suit and horn-rimmed glasses smiled worriedly in black and white out of the bottom left-hand corner.

  'Who told him?' Moira asked.

  'She left instructions, hen. Him tae be told. And yourself, of course. Afterwards.'

  'And when did she know?'

  'Now there's a question. Maybe two days. Maybe two weeks.'

  'Or maybe,' Moira said bitterly, 'it was written in her teacup years ago. Donald, what did I do to her? Why could she no' tell me?'

  She looked out of the end bay window, from which the Duchess would sit and observe. The caravan was on a mound at the top of the site with all the lesser caravans laid out below it, like a village around a castle. The Firth of Clyde was a grey pencil line along the horizon; the hint of shading was the Isle of Arran.

  Donald wasn't looking at her. He had his disgusting old trilby hat in his hands, a brown finger poking through the hole in the crown.

  How much was he keeping to himself, this cousin who'd guarded the Duchess for more than half a century, whose task it had been, as if laid down in the stars, to watch over the Duchess since she was a wee girl and him not that much older?

  Who, thirty-eight years ago, had seen her through the awful scandal of giving birth to the daughter of a young council official in horn-rimmed glasses - the very man ordered to clear the gypsies from their summer site overlooking the Clyde, the bureaucratic busybody so bewitched by her beauty, it was said, that he couldn't hold his clipboard steady.

  'She wis worried about you. I'll tell ye that much.'

  'She'd no cause,' Moira said.

  'Wisny easy for her, y'understand. You bein' away so much.'

  Thirty-eight years ago, mysteriously, the gypsies had been allowed to keep their autumn site overlooking the Clyde. Her father - and his indomitable mother - had received the child.

  'Rescued the child,' as her gran had phrased it. A deal. The wee girl, abandoned to a starchy Presbyterian upbringing in a genteel Glasgow suburb, abandoned to a weak and diffident father, a powerfully narrow grandmother.

  'Will ye go in now?'

  Donald nodding at the sliding door to the wee hallway and, beyond it, the bedroom where the Duchess was.

  'I can't,' Moira said, 'I can't see her dead.'

  Donald finally lifted his gaze to her, the lines deepening around his mouth. 'She'll be offended. The nieces ha' been with her all the morning. Until you came. It was assumed ...'

  'I'll have no one make assumptions about me.' Moira shook her black, nearly-shoulder-length hair, turned sharply and walked out of the caravan door.

  The old man followed her, clenching and unclenching his fists around his hat, very agitated.

  'Listen... stop.' Clattering down the steps after her. 'Wait.' Pulling out an envelope. 'You wis to have this - when you saw her.'

  'What is it?'

  'Take it now,' Donald said, and she nodded.

  But still walked away, pushing the envelope into a side pocket of her tweed jacket.

  The Duchess's death lay over the site like low cloud, the colours the caravans dulled.

  There was nobody much about as she wandered among the caravans on this drab autumn morning, as she had a quarter of a century ago; a twelve-year-old girl on her way home from the high school, a girl who'd been warned, since she could toddle, to stay away from the old railway where the gypsies camped in the autumn.

  The woman in her early thirties with the long dark hair and fingers of fire had been waiting, unsmiling, on the steps of the Caravan. Had flicked disdainfully at the clipped hair of the plain, quiet child. How is your father? Does he speak of me often?

  He never speaks of you. Defiant.

  But he thinks of me, I reckon, as he shuffles his papers in his, wee office. And he dreams.

  A dozen rings on her hands: rubies and emeralds and sapphires, glittering hypnotically. Moira had been so confused and her stomach churning; she'd been having headaches on and off all day, had not wanted to get up, her gran giving her the stern eye, 'Don't you go telling your fibs, you're looking perfectly fit and well, did you no' complete your homework, is that it?'

  The woman with the rings had said, Don't you worry yourself, you're not sick, you're just changing. And had given her only child a present. An old comb of dull, grey metal, like a dog's comb with teeth missing.

  Take it. It's yours. For a time.

  What do I …?

  What would you expect to do with it? You comb your hair. And 'member today, 'cause you'll never be a wee girl again.

  Twelve years old Bewilderment. The excitement of the unknown. Headaches and tummy pains. Blood on white cotton sheets. Hush, now, you're no' dying, its only the curse.

  The curse? The gypsy curse?

  Don't talk such nonsense, Moira, go back to your bed.

  The comb, gliding through her lengthening hair in the static electricity, blue sparks,

  The hair grew. And the rows began. You look like a damn gypsy, get it cut at once.

  Never.

  Moira walked off the site now, past piled-up black rubbish sacks awaiting collection, one already plundered by the crows. Well,, she'd known, of course, as a kid, that her mother was with the travellers. Except that the way the story had been told to her was, like: Your mother didn't want you. Your mother abandoned you and ran off with the dirty gypsies. The words, that whore, passing from grandparent to parent in times of stress.

  It was a scrappy place. There'd been an industrial estate here in the old days; now there were breezeblock walls and girders.

  When she was rich, when she'd signed the contract with Epidemic and got an incredible amount up front, she'd come here to see her exotic mother and very foolishly offered to buy her a house of her own or at least a nice place to put her caravan.

  She remembered sitting in the china cave, so full of herself. I've been asked to join a band on a two-album contract, Mammy; the money's amazing. So excited at being able to do something for the Duchess. Hard to believe now that she'd ever been quite that dense.

  Even the jewels on the Duchess's hands had seemed to sparkle with a cold rage.

  I would not take your money (the Duchess with magnificent severity, a strong, cultured accent by then) even if it was good money. Don't you dare insult me, girl. You were directed towards a spiritual path, and you've forsaken it. You're dabbling. Deviating. You've taken the devil's currency. You're a stupid, stupid girl. I cannot believe what you're doing …

  She hadn't seen her mother for close on four years after that.

  Moira wandered up the rubbly lane which led to where the factories might once have been. The sky had gone white, the sea had disappeared and the Isle of Arran was no more than an impression on a tablecloth.

  She sat on an upturned oil drum and took out the envelope Donald had given her and stared at it for a long time.

  There was nothing on the front except for one letter, in the Duchess's familiar baroque scrawl.

  M

  She stared for several minutes at the envelope.

  Four years on, after the Abbey, she'd returned to the site wearing dark, dowdy clothes and no make-up. Amid the tumble of her long, black hair there was now a single, slender vein of white. A souvenir from the Abbey.

  She'd walked boldly up to the door of the palace on wheels, looking the Duchess in the eye.

  And then she'd broken down.

  Just like now.

  She slipped a hand inside her jacket, unzipped the breast pocket and took out the cloth bundle. Slowly, sitting on the oil drum, she unwrapped the comb; metal, grey-brown like stone. A thousand, two thousand years old. Undistinguished, utility, like a doggy's comb.

  Moira wept, sliding the envelope with M on the front back into her pocket.

  It was very dim in the little hallway with all the doors closed.

  She knocked on the plywood panel. The door slid back, and there was Donald
in his blue suit with his hat in his hands, the bobbing light of candles at his back.

  He said, very softly, 'The Duchess'll receive you hen.'

  Used to put pennies on dead people's eyes, didn't they, to the lids down?

  Oh, Christ.

  She looked around for Donald, to ask him why ... why?

  But Donald had slipped away and closed the sliding door behind him. She was alone in here with the curtains closed and candles, four of them, at the head and the foot of the long, wide bed.

  No china in here; the walls were clean white. Where Donald had stood, behind her, his back to the wall beyond the bottom of the bed, shadows reared in the dancing light. She stood watching these shadows, her back to the bed, afraid to turn around again.

  She closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing. The air had a scent of violets. She tried to speak, to pray, but it was if there was a film of wax over her lips.

  You are not supposed to do this to me, Mammy.

  Slowly she turned around to face the deathbed and started to open her eyes, but she was too afraid and closed them tighter. And she could still see the little candle flames, reddened through the eyelids, giving off heat like the flames which, all those years ago, had engorged two mangled vehicles in a country lane.

  Remembering how the flames had risen through the hissing rain, two columns of fire joining above the wreckage, forming a shape like a giant blazing harp, its strings the gilded arrows the rain.

  Why? Why this, now? Get me out of this.

  She took a breath and opened her eyes.

  The Duchess wore a satin nightdress of grey, edged with silver, like cold sun behind rainclouds.

  White pillows behind her shoulders, white pillows behind her head, a bank of pillows. Her river of long white hair spread into a delta, her lips slightly parted over grey-white, pearly teeth.

  Moira's heart hung like a stone in her breast and beneath her jacket and the sleeves of her silk blouse, she felt the goosebumps rise.

  The Duchess was sitting bolt upright in her bed and her eyes were wide open, still as glass and fixed coldly upon her only daughter.

  You are dead. You are supposed to be quiescent, on your back, with that marble, sculpted look so that people can say. Doesn't she seem so peaceful? You are not supposed to challenge me, Mammy. I'm too old to be afraid of a corpse.

  There was electricity in the violet-scented air. Candlelight flickered in the gems of the rings on the hands of the Duchess, a proud, vain woman, a mother before twenty, dead now before sixty.

  Dead? Was this thing dead? Was this how she'd been when Daddy had come? Was this why, for Christ's sake, his glasses were misted?

  No. This was for her.

  The long, thin hands were rigidly clasped upon the sheets, her little finger curled slightly outwards as if pointing at Moira.

  You have some damage to repair.

  The Duchess had said this once. Now, as if the body on the bed had opened its lips, she heard it whispered, with studio clarity, in her head.

  Damage.

  You set me up, Donald, you auld bastard, you set me up for this.

  She took out the envelope, pale blue Basildon Bond, and the Duchess watched from her pillows as she slit the top with the thumbnail of her right hand.

  One sheet of paper, folded in two.

  The Duchess watched her read the words, two of them, printed in capitals, each followed by a large question mark.

  BREADWINNER?

  and

  DEATHOAK?

  Moira said, voice as dry as woodash, 'You can't do this. You're a sham, a phoney. You can't con me with your wee tricks ... you hear me?'

  She tried to tighten her lips in defiance, but her mouth had gone to rubber, like after anaesthetic at the dentist's.

  Instead, she struggled to get both hands together around the paper, gripping her right hand with her left to make it close. She crumpled the paper in her hands. It crackled as if it was on fire, so loud that she barely heard the other sound, the silken slithering.

  As two pillows slid to the floor and the Duchess, with a sighing of satin, subsided into the sheets.

  Part Two

  I

  A Sob You Could See

  Sir Wilfrid, striding stiffly in his gardening tweeds, led the way to the end of his terrace to offer up the full horror of the eyesore on the hill.

  'And the trees - the few that there were - they chopped them down. Can you imagine doing that? This is the Cotswolds, heaven's sake. Do they know who lives over the valley?'

  'You mean the Prince of Wales?'

  Sir Wilfrid snorted. 'Do you think he should have to see that every time he drives up the lane?'

  Martin Broadbank, for his sins, chairman of the district council's environmental health committee, said, 'I'm sure that, on his scale of monstrous architectural carbuncles, that place wouldn't be terribly noteworthy. But I see your point.'

  The house on the hill was the size of a moderate Victorian mansion. It had been built, in what, loosely, could be described as the approved Cotswold style, employing the kind of reconstituted ochre stone used for council houses, to make them blend in with the traditional village architecture.

  It blended in like a cheeseburger at a vicarage tea. Sir Wilfrid was right: not a tree of any substance, nor even a trickle of ivy up the walls. All the other newish houses in the hamlet had been neatly stitched into the tapestry of the landscape. This one was sliced off from it by a fence six feet high, slats damn near as thick as railway sleepers.

  'Twenty-two years at the D of E.' Sir Wilfrid brushed a dead leaf from his gardening trousers. 'And one ends up with that on one's skyline. And at night …'

  Martin Broadbank noted the lawns sloping up to the yellow house, flanking its gravel drive, the grass shaven billiard-table smooth He counted six tightly clipped dwarf conifers, of the kind you found in your suburban handkerchief patch. So much for landscaping.

  He said carefully, 'I believe he was quite a well-known musician at one time.'

  'Hmph,' said Sir Wilfrid. 'Nobody I've ever heard of. Nobody the granddaughter has even heard of. Besides, thought all these pop chaps were supposed to be members of the damned Green Party. Fellow wants to keep nature at bay, hell doesn't he go and live in Battersea?'

  'Er ... quite.' Martin Broadbank always felt a trifle uncomfortable in discussions of this nature; three of his supermarkets had been built in the face of impassioned protest from local environmentalists. 'But your main problem is …'

  'The horrific noises. My wife feels threatened.'

  'How so, Sir Wilfrid?'

  'I mean, she seems normal enough, the woman. Runs some sort of healthfood business in Stroud. Him, we simply never see. Nobody ever sees him. There's an evil-looking little hippie type, lives in a caravan in the grounds - that's another scandalous breach of planning regs. But, you see, we hear the beggar, at night.'

  'The hippie?'

  'No, no … Storey. Presumably. The most frightful howling and wailing … dreadful shrill mournful whining, like a sick fox in the woods. And lights on, all night. All night. They say the man's disturbed, of course. And so, obviously, my wife …'

  Martin himself would probably have popped round and invited them for supper, check these people out. Not Sir Wilfrid's style; only way he'd communicate, if it ever became unavoidable, was by solicitor's letter.

  'And there's the daughter. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they should be in homes necessarily. But the way they have her dressed you'd swear they think she's normal.'

  'Normal, Sir Wilfrid?'

  Sir Wilfrid sniffed. 'Anyway,' he said, 'what does your council propose to do about them?'

  OK. Maybe there was a rational explanation. Fair enough. No hassle.

  The Weasel set off from his caravan, stepping over tree stumps.

  Rational? Nah. Rational, bollocks. As Tom would say.

  It was cold, the air gnawing at his sunken cheeks. He pulled down his woollen hat and buttoned his old US Arm
y combat jacket. Wedged under his left arm was an LP record, Goat's Head Soup by the Rolling Stones.

  The yellow back wall of the big, boring house loomed over him like a prison block. It was an ugly fucking house. They could've done better, Tom and Shelley; you could get yourself a terrific old drum hereabouts for half what this pile cost. Yeah, yeah, Shelley needed somewhere big, with the office and the computers and that. And, yeah, the local council had been good with the grants and stuff, dead keen to promote all this tele-village, home-business shit.

  But it still didn't figure, any more than a lot of things.

  And - Weasel sniffed the damp bonfire smell of autumn - there was still too much pain in the air. Left over from last night, maybe, when the great rainbow of purified pain had arched, throbbing, over the house.

  The Weasel had worshipped the electric guitar since the days when the Stratocaster was just a gleam in Mr Fender's eye. The guitar dragged out of you what you couldn't otherwise express: pulled the rage out of your head, the fear out of your guts, the hard longing out of your ... groin.

  Turned all this into music. Wielding your axe like Tom Storey could was like sprouting a new vital organ.

  It was a beautiful thing.

  But last night the Weasel had been almost cowering in his caravan, fifty yards behind the house, where it sounded like Tom Storey had cut open his belly and was slowly unravelling his guts.

  It had started normally enough, with Tom playing along with old Cream and Yardbirds albums, nostalgia time. But then Tom's playing had kind of reeled away and you didn't hear the records any more, only these slippery ribbons of pain.

  And when you looked out, you'd swear you could see it, hazy around the rooftop: what Weasel called the rainbow.

  Except a rainbow was a pretty thing, and this was all dark colours, purples and greys: like a sob you could see.

  He stopped. He was about six yards from the house. He could hear voices, not from the house. He looked down across long lawns the size of three bowling greens and saw the titled geezer that lived in this quaint old cottage on the edge of the village. He was talking to another, taller guy and pointing up this way.